Vlad joined THG as a data scientist before it had any data infrastructure. He set to work creating the Group’s data strategy, centralised data operation and structure, ending up at the head of a global workforce of over 40 employees across machine learning, experimentation, data engineering and BI in less than 12 months. This coincided with THG becoming one of the fastest-growing British unicorns (a privately-held start-up worth over $1 billion). T
As head of data science, Vlad successfully commercialised products for anomaly and cyber-attack detection, micro-segmentation and personalisation, product and customer embeddings, advanced image search, fraud detection and natural language processing.
He then moved to Pets at Home where, aged just 28, as the group head of analytics platform and data engineering, he is helping to spur similar growth, with a focus on cloud-native infrastructure, engineering and visualisation. Vlad has established three teams – data platform, data engineering and data visualisation – following the principle of structuring teams around good people, promoting them into roles before their time, and throwing people at problems they’ve never solved before.
These teams grew from three colleagues to 16 in less than six months and Vlad continues to innovate in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, using online-only recruitment and onboarding, remote management and a comprehensive programme of team-wide social and training events.
Vlad is a hands-on leader and, together with his teams, he’s supporting one of the strategic pillars of the business by building a best-in-class, cloud-native, scalable and robust analytics platform, with a focus on zero trust security and privacy by design, serving an internal audience of 12,000-plus. He also gives back to the community by mentoring young people on their journeys towards entrepreneurship and data.
